Some may appreciate hearing news (a week old) that Redis has moved to a new open source license (agplv3), changing course from their 2024 license switch (then to sspl). This change to agplv3 is as of Redis 8, which also adds new capabilities and rolls features of the previously paid “redis stack” into the core. Will it please all? No. Have some moved on to alternatives who won’t look back? Sure.
But since the topic of the redis license change (and growing popularity of Valkey as an alternative) has come up here in recent weeks/months (and I’d mentioned it in my cfcamp 2024 talk on using Redis for sessions in Lucee and ACF), I thought I’d share this new info here.
1 ) Sure, one can find many instances of vendors backing redis alternatives after the 2024 change–with Valkey being the current “leader in the clubhouse”. And some are innovating, just as now redis is also. I wasn’t bringing this up to debate or even contend with those points.
Again I brought it up simply for those still with any interest in redis, since this news won’t get anywhere near the publicity of the 2024 news.
2 ) To your point about the license change that started all this–and your “guess” that Valkey’s license might better suit the “Lucee/Boxlang audience” (and ACF folks also), I’ll clarify that the move by redis to the spss license last year only affected (almost entirely) those who provided redis hosting services to others. They were making LOTS of money off redis and generally not giving back (money or effort); a familiar story.
The fact that the change directly affected only them was lost in the hysteria…which contended simplisticly that “redis has moved away from open source licensing” which was not true. It WAS still open source–and it was NOT that “anyone who wanted to use it had to pay”. Instead they were changing to a DIFFERENT open source license…which directly impacted only a very tiny audience who sold redis hosting.
Granted, that had a trickle down effect on any who USED such redis hosting. But to be clear, if you ran your own redis, the change had virtually no impact beyond a lot of hand-wringing.
Still, to address ongoing contention and the bad pr, they’ve made this latest change to a still different open source license (agplv3), hoping it’s more acceptable to many. It may all be too little, too late–to get them back to where they were, sure.
Anyway I’m just helping bring the news to light in our little corner of the IT world, again since the subject had come up here since last year.
For more, see any of many resources (some supportive and some skeptical of the move), such as Redis is now available under the the OSI-approved AGPLv3 open source license..